


and the ones who had loved her the most

by asongtosaygoodbye



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 16:12:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19360354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asongtosaygoodbye/pseuds/asongtosaygoodbye
Summary: High in the halls of the kings who are gone—Jenny would dance with her ghosts.The ones she had lost andthe ones she had found,And the ones who hadloved her the most…Some nights, the assassin dreams of dancing.A bittersweet songfic nightmare sequence, set to Jenny of Oldstones by Florence + The Machine.





	and the ones who had loved her the most

**Author's Note:**

  * For [contrequirose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/contrequirose/gifts).



> i recently read "nothing left to stop us here" by @contrequirose who is so wonderful, and then i've just been thinking about these three so much, so here we are.

_High in the halls of the kings who are gone—_  
_Jenny would dance with her ghosts._  
_The ones she had lost and_  
_the ones she had found,_  
_And the ones who had_  
_loved her the most…_

On the nights when Astrid dreams, her mind is swallowed by a coldness that sits tucked in the hollow of her chest, soaking scalpel sharp between her bones. 

Ghostlights shiver on the underside of black water, murky, pallid shapes floating just below the surface. 

Obsidian. Glass, frigid beneath her fingers.

_The ones who'd been gone for so very long  
She couldn't remember their names…_

Tiny flecks of candlelight begin to flicker in the edges of her vision—miniscule stars, soft orange pin pricks blooming in the green-black void. They reflect across the ice, the glass and she stands, nails cresting sharp into her elbows. 

Across the void, there is movement.

There is a shape, reedy and thin, walking silently towards her. 

A shock of copper hair hushes against the figure's jaw in the low light and it is a ghost that looks like Bren, except that it’s not, because that boy had gone mad and then died, unbodied some slow winter in the pale belly of a hospital he had been locked away to disappear in—

But here in the black of her mind, he is almost exactly as she remembers him.

Cheeks a bit sallow and starved but so faintly smiling, sharp and boney and boyish and sure, moving soundless in the hall.

Her dead best friend tilts his head and offers her a hand, his other held neatly behind his back.

In the world of her dream, she takes it.

_They spun her around on the damp old stones  
Spun away all her sorrow and pain…_

Beneath their feet, the black ice warms into white marble, faintly rosey with the firelight. 

Here in this room, they are seventeen again and he looks at her like he is in love with her, because Bren is a boy who is so easily in love with things he cannot control. In love with a country, with a creed, with a girl and a boy and a promise that all this violence would be worth something one day. 

It is a promise that will kill him later, but right now he raises her left arm in an arc and spins her, their steps sweeping a soft waltz across the glass and the ghosts.

There is a warm hand on her waist and the vision smells light sunlight soaked into skin, like overturned earth and summer and homespun linen, the only thing left alive in here. 

 

_And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave  
Never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave..._

 

She had wanted to visit him, then, but they weren't allowed. Eodwulf had been the one to actually say it, in the quiet, in the dark, in the gold trimmed silence of their graduation night, back at the Academy, back pretending that they weren't so far removed now from these youth, these self important students who had not starved and fought and killed for what they had earned.

She had wanted to see him, but then the master had told them that Bren had hung himself with a bedsheet so then it didn't matter anyway.

He was weak and he was wrong and he was a symbol of everything they needed to rise above and avoid and this was all true, but she had still loved him regardless of this, in spite of this.

She had loved him in the way that only people who had survived what they had survived together could, but that didn't matter either.

He was still a dead boy and she was a girl who had grown numbly into her weaponhood without him.

_They danced through the day and into the night—_  
_through the snow that swept through the hall._  
_From winter to summer then winter again_  
_'Til the walls did crumble and fall..._

He had always been a fine enough dancer, but she was better. 

She had had more practice. 

Her father had spent his life tuning the pianos that richer men had broken—bowstrings and lutes and harpsichords, a beggar's trade in times of war. 

Her mother had taught herself the delicate scales across borrowed sheet music before she'd ever learned to read, an illiterate farmer's daughter gone off to marry a frivolous man. 

In the evenings of their home, there had been hunger but there had also been music—preludes and nocturnes and waltzes.

She remembers standing on her father's shoes when she was still a child, holding on to his hands to learn some of the dances while her mother laughed and played their piano, her long hands splayed across the keys.

_Eins, zwei, drei...eins, zwei, drei...gut gemacht, liebste! Now, mit deiner Mutter._

Across the room, Astrid _sees them_ in the slow firelight.

Her father and her mother twirling across their own fragments of marble in the glow, dressed in things finer than they could have ever owned in the world of the living. Her mother's body sheathed in a pale absinthe silk, powder green skirts swirling like a dream in the windless air. Her father with a matching ribbon tied around his collar, pressed white shirt and trim pants, fine waistcoat and the pocket watch he always wore, a hand me down from a great great grandfather.

The music draws her motions long like a bowstring, this violin cadence swelling in her chest as Bren's ghost guides her through the steps, a faceless crowd in festive finery blooming forth from her mind, populating the room. Reflecting endlessly in the cracked mirrors, couples and skirts and sweet music, champagne and chandeliers. 

The circles join closer, her family is smiling and Bren trades her politely to her father, the two of them picking up the dance, the steps familiar and smooth between them, gliding across the floor, his wrinkled eyes crinkling down at her, his dark hair greying and his smile kind.

They square across the space, swing to the music. Halfway through he places his hands on her waist and lifts her so easily as he did when she was a child, when she was a teenager, so much joy at the party they threw when her acceptance letter came in, this miracle of scholarship delivered in a gold stamped envelope to their tiny town. 

He sets her down, still laughing and turns her to her mother, letting them trade off into a folk dance, a familiar tune the villagers would play at Winterscrest and Harvest Close, lilting and gold on these finer instruments.

_And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave_  
_Never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave..._  
_And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave_  
_Never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave…_

White foam begins to froth the corners of her mother's mouth.

It spills down the front of her dress with a horrible gurgle, eyes rolling back in her head. 

Every place on the woman that she touches becomes pale and rigid, corrodes rigor mortis blue, a greenish hue stiffening the veins until she _convulses_ as the music swells, pitching and higher and deeper as her mother's body writhes and pales and jerks in suspension, the foam frothing thicker, slurring pink with blood, with her ruining lungs, sweating and pale and—

Astrid closes her eyes to it.

Returns and finds her hands kneading dough in her parent's tiny kitchen, the orange oven fire and the sickly wallpaper, folding hollyhock into the leavening. Dropping deadly acid into their wine glasses, the ones they had taken out for the _special occasion_ , their daughter and her friends home from school to visit before their graduation, the three of them oh so bright, so proud, five table settings all around.

She wonders how many days it took the neighbors to find their bodies, left distending at the dining table, maggots rotting through their mouths, their unfinished food—

She turns and finds her hands slicking black with blood, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Eodwulf as he wipes down a short blade. His stronger body bracketed between herself and Bren in the dim moonlight, cleaning his father's viscera from his hands. The three of them dizzy with adrenaline and sweating with fever from their latest round of conditioning, splinters of conductive quartz stitched and inflamed beneath their skin that made them strong and sharp enough to do this—

She watches Bren's mind splinter in slow motion as his mother and his father's death screams rise like heat from the roaring firelight, pitching louder and louder and banging because they _can't get out_ , they've barred the door with a horse cart, and Bren is sinking to his knees and his eyes are ringed in white around the blue, sightless and staring and Wulf is grabbing up his limp arms and dragging him away because failure is not an option and failure means death and failure means being locked in a stone box beneath the earth to starve until you learn your lesson or become clever enough to break your own way out and this is going to hurt but you are going to be stronger for it, this is going to hurt but out there those traitors, those criminals, those cancers of the crown will do anything they can to kill you so it is good that you learn how to survive them here, where it's _safe_ —

She thinks of them again when they were young, unsure if any three of them would survive this. 

Preparing her mind to watch the heat leave her friends bodies, imagining that one of them would die from pain or infection on the operating table.

She thinks of her own body, stripped to the waist, strapped flat to the table. Pain searing white around the edges of her vision as thin slivers of magic lacerated her from the inside out, teaching her how to focus, how to become so much stronger than the weakness of the body, hunger cutting her mind into a scalpel. 

Growing older and learning how to turn those instruments into her own hand, using her skills and her lessons and her arcane implements to flay secrets from the minds of the men and the women that they hunted in the night. Bombers. Terrorists. Defectors. Small town rebels spreading death plans in basement rooms—

_Eins, zwei, drei...eins, zwei drei...eins zwei drei..._

Back in the mirrored blackness of her mind, bloated arms and waterlogged limbs begin to bob up against the bottom of the glass.

All of her unnamed dead, clotting up beneath the surface of the water, a sliver of black ice keeping them sequestered beneath her feet.

_High in the halls of the kings who are gone  
Jenny would dance with her ghosts…_

She feels a haze of warmth sandpaper across the tips of her fingers and the dead boy's hands are there again, one last gentle squeeze before pulling away.

She looks up and the sourceless candles begin to flicker out one by one, slipping the black glass back into darkness, obscuring the white, the fishbelly pallor of long gone cadavers. 

Her hands became corpse cold to her own touch as the music faded, slowed like a music box, a tune trying to carry under water.

_The ones she had lost and the ones she had found…_

As the last of the lights snuffed out, she felt a soft kiss pressed to her forehead.

_And the ones  
Who had loved her the most._

The ice threatened to crack and she stepped backwards into the blackness, into the helldark. Closing herself off to that heat signature aching in her palms,

keeping herself intact.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!
> 
> im always looking for other CR folks to follow, you can find me over @trans-droid on tumblr 💛


End file.
